Me, My Camera, My Life. A Beginner's Journey.

I love photography! My first camera was a 3.2MP Canon Powershot A400 and I took lots of nice picture with it and most of them... outdoors. I bought it just before my trip to Taiwan on October 2004 for a conference and I sold it for less than half the price on October last year, that is 2006. All the outdoors pictures are very nice, the colors saturates naturally and enough clarity that my holiday trips becomes very nice in frames. But the indoors were horrible! I can't get enough light to have nice images. Turn on the flash, the pictures becomes very bright on the subjects and very dark on the background.

I replaced it with a Nikon Coolpix L6 after a short visit to a local dealer. Compared it head to head with a Sony DSC S500 and I chose the Nikon as it gives me a more natural colors. Got it back home and was amazed on what this little thing can do versus the old A400. It got all the 'scene style' setting required for my indoor shootings and its movie mode captures nice clip of my kids. However, I'm still not satisfied. I want to be able to control the setting my way! With this camera, I can't set the shutter speed, the aperture as I like. And even though my problem with A400 flash range resolved, I still get blurry pictures indoors!

And I forked myself some more money and bought a Canon A540, a compact with a lot of manual controls in less than a month after the Nikon! This thing can do aperture priority mode, shutter priority mode and manual setting mode!

At the same time, a friend of mine Johann sent me a link to his webpage, showing off the output of his new hobby. From there a lot more links to his friends website sharing the same hobby opens up a new direction to me, Digital SLR! All the picture they posted are very nice and very tempting. This is very very interesting! Bouquet, layering, composition, and all of the new jargon suddenly fills up my brain. I said to myself.... I gonna love this!

I went out with Johann and his photog friends for few outings with my A540. Took a lot of nice pics and hell, even though my composition is nice, I have lots of limitation. Imagine, a bunch of guys with SLR and one of them is using a silver compact.

My F number can go widest at 2.8 and smallest at 8. I can't get nice bokeh and I can't make it small enough to get the waterfalls silky effect. And my pics have a lot of noise on the sky, clouds and very much lacking in depth and details as compared to their SLRs output. Of course... their cameras are few folds more expensive than mine. And I feel damn stupid to buy the second compact as I can get an SLR with the money I just paid for the two cameras.

To the height of my frustrations, I went to a seaside holiday with my family, took sunrise shots while my wife and kids still in bed and it turned out to be 'not so nice'....

And here I am, nearly a year later, a proud owner of a Canon 350D, one generation older than the current 400D. Got it new at two third the price of the 400D. Good bargain I believe! Of course, my equipment is not on par with 400D or the mid range, just released 40D with a lot of flexible and configurable settings, but in terms of picture clarity and ease of use, for a limited budget newbie like me, its more than enough!

Join me exploring the world of digital SLR photography, as a beginner! With budget in mind!